Colombia Médica

Colombia Médica is an international peer-reviewed medical journal that will consider any original contribution that advances or illuminates medical science or practice, or that educates to the journal's’ readers.The journal is owned by a non-profit organization, Universidad del Valle, and serves the scientific community strictly following the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) recommendations on publication ethics policies for medical journals. Colombia Médica publishes original research articles, viewpoints and reviews in all areas of medical science and clinical practice. However, Colombia Médica gives the highest priority to papers on general and internal medicine, public health and primary health care. Colombia Médica (ISSN 1657-9534) is indexed/tracked/covered by PubMed, MEDLINE, EMBASE, Scopus, Thomson Reuters (ISI) and Google Scholar.

Planar solid oxide fuel cell modeling and optimization targeting the stack's temperature gradient minimization

Minimization of undesirable temperature gradients in all dimensions of a planar solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) is central to the thermal management and commercialization of this electrochemical reactor. This article explores the effective operating variables on the temperature gradient in a multilayer SOFC stack and presents a trade-off optimization. Three promising approaches are numerically tested via a model-based sensitivity analysis. The numerically efficient thermo-chemical model that had already been developed by the authors for the cell scale investigations (Tang et al. Chem. Eng. J. 2016, 290, 252-262) is integrated and extended in this work to allow further thermal studies at commercial scales. Initially, the most common approach for the minimization of stack's thermal inhomogeneity, i.e., usage of the excess air, is critically assessed. Subsequently, the adjustment of inlet gas temperatures is introduced as a complementary methodology to reduce the efficiency loss due to application of excess air. As another practical approach, regulation of the oxygen fraction in the cathode coolant stream is examined from both technical and economic viewpoints. Finally, a multiobjective optimization calculation is conducted to find an operating condition in which stack's efficiency and temperature gradient are maximum and minimum, respectively.

A satisfação e atitudes dos docentes face à inclusão de crianças com Necessidades Educativas Especiais na Região Autónoma da Madeira

A ideia de escola inclusiva é uma realidade com a qual todos se confrontam nos dias de hoje. Esta ajuda a promover o desenvolvimento das pessoas com e sem necessidades educativas especiais, tendo demonstrado ser um grande benefício para todos. Este estudo tem como objetivo compreender qual a satisfação dos docentes face à inclusão dos alunos com necessidades educativas especiais, na Região Autónoma da Madeira, bem como compreender a atitude e perspetiva dos educadores de infância e professores dos ensinos básico e secundário em relação a esta problemática. Na realização deste estudo, utilizou-se um inquérito por questionário para a recolha de dados, recorrendo a uma metodologia de cariz quantitativo. Os resultados desta investigação concluem que os docentes apresentam valores baixos a médios, no que se refere à sua satisfação profissional face à inclusão. Observou-se que os docentes mais novos demonstraram uma maior satisfação. Verifica-se também que os docentes do sexo masculino revelaram estar mais satisfeitos do que os do sexo feminino. Finalmente, constatou-se que os docentes com menos tempo de serviço estão mais satisfeitos do que os que possuem mais tempo de serviço. No que diz respeito às atitudes, verificamos que os professores concordaram que os docentes mais jovens, os que têm menos tempo de serviço e os do sexo feminino possuem atitudes mais favoráveis face à inclusão das crianças com NEE.

Teaching / learning process through the case method in the law degree

This project in teaching innovation and improvement aims to disseminate the case method as one of the most innovative educational instruments inteaching of Law in general, and specifically with regard to Family and Inheritance Law. The methodology used ensures learning through a legal conflict, which must be resolved by the students themselves from different viewpoints as legal agents. This is an activity in teaching innovation, in which students become the protagonists. Participation is voluntary, and the main aim is student motivation. The subject's aim is for students to learn public speaking skills fundamental to the profession while familiarising themselves with judicial practice. Theteacher sets up a legal conflict in order for students to resolve the dispute as legal agents with divergent viewpoints - in other words, as judges, attorneys, lawyers and so on. The project seeks alternatives to traditional teaching methods and is an innovative teaching method aimed at professionally training future lawyers as well as being a model that involves students more in their own learning.

WORKFORCE DIVERSIFICATION

According to the State Human Resources Division, discrimination complaints are significant. In order to reduce the number of complaints within the South Carolina Department of Transportation, this project on workplace diversification was devised. Diversification has benefits in the workplace that include increased adaptability, broader service range, variety of viewpoints, and more effective execution . Increased adaptability allows employees from diverse backgrounds to bring individual talents and experience to the workplace. A broader service range allows employees with different skills and experience such as language to provide additional services. Improving the diversification will ultimately align this agency with an Affirmative Action Plan and decrease discrimination complaints.

Avaliação e controlo da qualidade da água de albufeiras com base em modelos dinâmicos

A problemática relacionada com a modelação da qualidade da água de albufeiras pode ser abordada de diversos pontos de vista. Neste trabalho recorre-se a metodologias de resolução de problemas que emanam da Área Cientifica da Inteligência Artificial, assim como a ferramentas utilizadas na procura de soluções como as Árvores de Decisão, as Redes Neuronais Artificiais e a Aproximação de Vizinhanças. Actualmente os métodos de avaliação da qualidade da água são muito restritivos já que não permitem aferir a qualidade da água em tempo real. O desenvolvimento de modelos de previsão baseados em técnicas de Descoberta de Conhecimento em Bases de Dados, mostrou ser uma alternativa tendo em vista um comportamento pró-activo que pode contribuir decisivamente para diagnosticar, preservar e requalificar as albufeiras. No decurso do trabalho, foi utilizada a aprendizagem não-supervisionada tendo em vista estudar a dinâmica das albufeiras sendo descritos dois comportamentos distintos, relacionados com a época do ano. ABSTRACT: The problems related to the modelling of water quality in reservoirs can be approached from different viewpoints. This work resorts to methods of resolving problems emanating from the Scientific Area of Artificial lntelligence as well as to tools used in the search for solutions such as Decision Trees, Artificial Neural Networks and Nearest-Neighbour Method. Currently, the methods for assessing water quality are very restrictive because they do not indicate the water quality in real time. The development of forecasting models, based on techniques of Knowledge Discovery in Databases, shows to be an alternative in view of a pro-active behavior that may contribute to diagnose, maintain and requalify the water bodies. ln this work. unsupervised learning was used to study the dynamics of reservoirs, being described two distinct behaviors, related to the time of year.

LA ECUACION UNIVERSAL DE EROSION

La erosión de los suelos agrícolas, la protección del manto vegetal en laderas inclinadas, la conservación de la fauna son temas de actualidad nacional y de problemática incluida como tema de análisis o discusión en los programas de varias carreras universitarias. El autor desea aportar elementos de juicio para enfrentar científicamente el problema de la erosión edáfica; para “ el control de un fenómeno físico o mecánico no se lleva a buen termino si el proceso de desarrollo del fenómeno no es entendido, los factores que lo determinan no pueden ser medidos y las mediciones presentadas en una ecuación”. En este artículo se hace revisión de los intentos para cuantificar el fenómeno mediante la aplicación de la Ecuación Universal de Perdida de Suelo. ABSTRACT The erosion of agricultural soils, protection of the natural cover on sloping and wild life conservation are now national issues and they are principal subjets of several courses in the universities. The author wants to contribute with some viewpoints or how to scientifically take up the problem of edaphic erosion. For him, “the control of the physical ormechanical phenomenon is not well carried out if the processes involved in the phenomenon itself are not undertood, or the determining factor are not measured and written down in a equation”. This paper reviews the attempts of quantifying the phenomenon by the application of the Universal Equitation of Equation of Soil Loss.

Neural Radiance Fields for Relighting and View Synthesis

Neural scene representation and neural rendering are new computer vision techniques that enable the reconstruction and implicit representation of real 3D scenes from a set of 2D captured images, by fitting a deep neural network. The trained network can then be used to render novel views of the scene. A recent work in this field, Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), presented a state-of-the-art approach, which uses a simple Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) to generate photo-realistic RGB images of a scene from arbitrary viewpoints. However, NeRF does not model any light interaction with the fitted scene; therefore, despite producing compelling results for the view synthesis task, it does not provide a solution for relighting. In this work, we propose a new architecture to enable relighting capabilities in NeRF-based representations and we introduce a new real-world dataset to train and evaluate such a model. Our method demonstrates the ability to perform realistic rendering of novel views under arbitrary lighting conditions.